Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Eli was one of the first to point to the North Carolina Leges exercise in Canuteism, ignoring a report of the Coastal Commission's scientific advisors that the state should plan for a one meter (39 inch) rise in sea level over the current century. They took the advice of one John Droz, Jr., a guy with a masters degree in physics who built a real estate fortune, hates wind power, is a scientific adviser to Chris Horner's crowd (the guys suing for Mike Mann's emails) and a speaker (guess what) at the Heartland Institute bun fight.

Yale 360 has a post by Rob Young, one of the science advisory board, describing what happened.

The reaction to our report was rapid and effective. NC-20, a group
purporting to represent North Carolina’s coastal counties, attacked both
the integrity of the science panel members and the body of sea level
rise literature that was reviewed. The rebuttal consisted largely of
oft-repeated arguments pulled from the climate skeptic blogosphere,
along with an adamant assertion that predicting the future is
impossible. To the great surprise of those of us on the state’s science
panel, these tactics have worked.

Young points out that

I have received many emails and phone calls from other scientists over
the last two weeks pledging their assistance and volunteering to “come
help educate the senators” in North Carolina. Sadly, I don’t think it
will help. Quite frankly, those fighting the need to plan for
accelerated sea level rise in coastal North Carolina do not want to be
“educated.”

They assert that talk of sea level rise will ruin the coastal economy,
impact insurance rates, and deter coastal development. This is absurd.

It is, of course, your blog average denialism in action, and the reason why it is absurd to allow the denialists to bully us about being mean to them. They ARE in denial and proud of it, except when their denial is called out for what it is.

And as Young points out, that denial is going to cost everyone a lot of money for rebuilding after the deluge, and, if anyone is stupid enough to believe the Canutes, in throwing money into doomed and badly planned coastal infrastructure.

"And as Young points out, that denial is going to cost everyone a lot of money for rebuilding after the deluge.."

My lord. You know, to be successful you greenies must get better at math and economics, otherwise you are truly going to fail. Please understand this; when you claim that doing nothing will cost us much more than if we do something, you are demonstrating that you don't understand simple economics. Something that costs more adds to our GDP, governments like things that add to our GDP. Claiming that doing nothing will cost us more is exactly what governments want. In effect, you are telling them to do nothing. You are shooting yourselves in the foot by saying this. Amazing.

Someone recently linked somewhere to a video of Monckton railing against the inevitability of sea level rise, and during his diatribe he smugly offered to buy coastal property from punters for the princely sum of one dollar, claiming that his estate would enjoy the benefits for centuries to come.

The thing he didn't seem to cotton on to was that in putting forward this offer, he expressly valued those coastal properties as being effectively worthless. In essence he did what insurance companies do when they refuse to renew policies for flood-prone coastal areas.

For what it's worth, if anyone's tempted to take up Monckton's offer, drop me a line here first. I'd like the chance to put in a counter-offer ten times - no, a hundred times - greater than the cheapskate and hypocritical neo-carpetbagger's one dollar peppercorn. The difference will be that I have no expectation that the property will last for centuries to the benefit of my heirs, although I reckon that there's still some profit to be had in the interim if one is going to so devalue the current worth of such property, and I certainly have no expectation that the value will do anything other than decrease as global warming fully manifests.

I expect insurance companies to issue insurance policies based on mainstream science predictions, erring on the high side of predictions. If the state should try to force them to issue policies based on i their predictions then insurance will no longer be on offer.

Young Hardy, Let us try an experiment. I will bring a deck that has 40 green cards and 10 red cards. For each trial, we will shuffle the deck and draw a card. If the card is green, you owe me $10. If it is red, I owe you $10. Let us repeat this experiment 100 times and see how things work out. I predict I will have a much fatter wallet at the end than I did at the beginning. Shall we try? After all, since predicting the future is impossible, you've nothing to lose, right?

Prof. Rob Young, one of the authors of the SLR report that prompted North Carolina legislators to imagine they could succeed where Cnut failed, has written a forthright and very sane piece in response to the attacks on the report.

"A far more likely scenario than a conspiracy to get funding is this: The scientists and engineers in these organizations looked at the peer-reviewed literature and concluded that global change is real, and that an expectation for an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise is reasonable."

It's worth noting that The Star is (or, at least when I was stamping around that part of the world, was) a free weekly newspaper provided largely as a vehicle to promote the region's current real estate sales.

I wonder how many folk would consider the conflict of interest inherent in such a piece...

Hi Anonymous. Those free weeklies often fill that role for the local real estate businesses.

Gosford City Council's vote to remove sea-level rise notations (first I've heard about that) suggests that perceptions of conflict of interest haven't been enough to stop the real estate lobby from having its way.

I wonder if Lake Macquarie City Council will suppress sea-level warnings too.

For any non-Aussies reading this, there are three levels of government here - federal, state and local. These councils are the local level of government and are responsible for local roads, garbage collection, land-use zoning, approving building plans etc.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.